Real-Time Insights Power Up Profitability in the Oil and Gas Industry

It doesn’t take much life experience to realize that everything runs more smoothly when all the parts are interconnected. Athletes compete more successfully when all their muscles, tendons, and bones work in sync. Communities remain safe and healthy when all public officials collaborate for the benefit of constituents. And the earth orbits at full throttle in concert with the entire solar system.

Inter-connectivity is also fundamental to keeping oil and gas enterprises agile and running smoothly. But in our rapidly expanding, lightning-fast digital environment, inter-connectivity has morphed into real-time hyper-connectivity. This ability to link every single aspect of your value chain – and do so in real time – can be a true game-changer. And today’s in-memory computing technology can make it a reality. Working with large oil and gas companies around the world, we’ve seen how it can deliver insights from the boardroom right down to the individual well level.

Contextual insight, delivered in real time

With an in-memory computing platform that supports a real-time view of company operations, you can act on the right instinct at the right moment. You can drill down into contextualized information and answer questions on demand – without waiting days or weeks for a PowerPoint jockey or spreadsheet master to generate an already outdated report. You can instantly understand the past, predict the future, and drive execution. You can deal with issues as – or even before – they arise, using actual figures to make fact-based decisions.

An in-memory computing platform enables real-time interaction with the specific people, places, devices, and information you need to manage your area of responsibility – whether it’s the entire company or a specific region, field, well, maintenance activity, or opex budget. By hyper-connecting your employees, contractors, service providers, and suppliers in real-time, you can gain full visibility into the activities of your entire resource pool. By combining enterprise data with real-time operational data coming from sensors and SCADA systems, you can get the specific metrics you care about. And by drilling down into these metrics, you can instantly answer questions like the following:

What’s my overall profitability for this region?

Why am I seeing a spike in operational expenditures for a given field?

What are the capital expenditures associated with bringing a new well online?

What’s causing a delayed intervention on a key asset?

What is the profitability of a given well so I can better prioritize interventions?

Does an intervention make sense given the profitability of a well?

Are my drilling operations on time and on budget? How are they doing based on rate of penetration and feet per day?

How do my operations compare with those of my competitors relative to lifting cost per well?

How will a delay impact the total production of a field? How can I mitigate or eliminate that delay?

With the answers in hand, you can gain a real-time perspective of how your entire enterprise, specific operations, or individual assets are doing at any given moment – along with the insight to trigger the right actions needed to maximize performance. An in-memory computing platform can even guide you in identifying the most probable resolution given past activities and current performance of that asset.

Benefits of significant proportions

Forward-looking companies are already starting the journey towards becoming hyper-connected, real-time enterprises – and achieving measurable results – using in-memory computing technology. In our work with a partner the oil and gas industry, we’ve seen companies increase production rates up to 15% by improving data flows and analytics. Another operator generated more than US$1 billion in shareholder value from improved information processing across its asset base – a sizeable return for an investment of only US$50 million.